Written by Milton Steinberg, the book is based on a historical character, a renegade rabbi who lived during the Roman conquest of Judea and was excommunicated.
As a child at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, Marion Blumenthal Lazan spent hours looking for four identical pebbles inside her shabby living quarters.
Workmen celebrate women today (and tomorrow), as The Workmen\’s Circle/Arbeter Ring presents \”Rosa: A Play About Rosa Luxemburg.\”
When German filmmaker Caroline Link read Stefanie Zweig\’s 1995 autobiographical novel, \”Nowhere in Africa,\” she was riveted by the unusual Holocaust story. The book describes how 5-year-old Zweig and her parents fled the Nazis to Kenya, where the girl fell in love with the harshly beautiful land.
\”Welcome to Heavenly Heights\” by Risa Miller (St. Martin\’s Press, $23.95).
Many writers have imagined the Jewish immigrant experience, setting their novels and short stories on the Lower East Side and places like that, where newcomers can forge their way to become Americans. Risa Miller\’s debut novel, \”Welcome to Heavenly Heights,\” is a different version of that story, with American Jews making new homes in Israel, reversing the exile. This transition can be more pressure cooker than melting pot, mixing idealism, religion, bureaucracy, family complexities, shifting expectations, love and, never far away, violence.
Dara Horn wrote an exuberant scene in her stunning debut novel, \”In the Image,\” upon returning to her dreary garret flat during a year abroad in 1999. \”I\’d been to this dismal British market in which an entire aisle was devoted to butter and fats,\” the ebullient Horn, 25, said animatedly. \”I recall a product called \’beef drippings.\’ The produce was wilting. All the milk was expired yesterday. I was very homesick.\”
Fans of Sara Paretsky\’s V.I. Warshawski detective novels are used to following the hard-edged but soft-hearted Chicago private investigator unravel interlocking stories of white-collar crime and corruption.
While there\’s plenty of crime and corruption in \”Total Recall\” (Dell, $7.99) the V.I. Warshawski novel recently released in paperback, there\’s also something new: the story of Lotty Herschel\’s flight from Austria on the eve of the war. Lotty was a young Jewish child living in Vienna when Hitler rose to power. At 9, she fled to London through the Kindertransport — the British rescue mission that saved thousands of Jewish children just before war broke out. She is now haunted by memories of her family that died, and does her best to suppress them.
Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths\” by Bruce Feiler (William Morrow & Co, $23.95).
Like the stock market, belief in the Bible as a record of past events goes up and down. Such belief is now skidding toward a low point. While the sobriety and detachment of professional scholarship may numb us into forgetting that anything crucial is at stake in Scripture\’s historical accuracy, let\’s not forget.
\”Under Radar\” by Michael Tolkin (Atlantic Monthly Press, $23).
Recently, I heard Michael Tolkin speak at Temple Beth Am about \”Under Radar.\” Pacing frenetically, he explained that midway through the writing he had stalled and shelved the manuscript. During that time, slipping on his own spiritual path — parallel to the novel\’s — he had ransacked various synagogues for answers and had succeeded only in worrying his wife.
Growing up in a Jewish home filled with books, I knew early on I wanted to be a writer like P.G. Wodehouse, Sam Levenson or my all-time favorite — Agatha Christie.
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